Need for Speed: Undercover

You’re tired, sleep has not been an option. Your day starts off relatively quietly until the peace and tranquillity of your morning drive is shattered. Blues and twos in your rear view mirror and before you know it you’ve got 4 bears on your tail trying to close you down.

Problem is, they don’t realise who you are.
Second problem is, they don’t realise what you’re driving isn’t just a run of the mill road car.

In a moment of clarity your right foot plants the gas pedal into the plush carpet in your high powered sports car and the chase is on. Before long those flashing lights in your rear view mirror fade to pinpricks and the sound of sirens grows more and more distant. Holing up in a parking garage you wait.

This is how your game begins as an undercover driver in EA’s latest racer, Need for Speed: Undercover.

With (really cheesy) FMV padding out the story of the slightly mysterious central character you play, you’re never quite sure whether you’re still loyal to the law, or whether you’ve become so embroiled in the dark seedy underbelly of Tri-City’s car crime syndicate that you can’t find a way out.

A return to form?

EA’s Black Box studio made a few good decisions with attempting to reboot the Need for Speed series after the rather shoddy and way too niche title ProStreet became the worst selling Need for Speed game so far. People didn’t get in with the repetitive circuit-based races and the canyon races were frustratingly twitchy. Mumblings and grumblings from gamers suggested that people would rather see a return to the core elements of the more successful Need for Speed games. Cops. Daylight and modding your cars.

Those core elements are front and centre in NFSU. The only problem is that very little else has changed and the ProStreet engine tech is still under the hood and still can’t cope with complex environments.

As NFSU takes place in a supposedly living breathing sandbox city which you can pick and choose your races / missions in, you’d think that the team would attempt to make you feel like you’re part of a realistic gameworld. Instead, Tri City feels like a ghost town. No pedestrians are ever seen. Very few other cars trundle about their business on the roads and though there are plenty of places to visit and things to see, after a solid hour of play you’ll think you’ve seen it all before.

We’ve already seen what Brandon thought of the 360 version and perhaps this game has bucked EA’s recent trend of producing solid cross-platform conversions, because the PS3 version feels unfinished, shoddy and even with a pared down city and traffic count, feels distinctly like it can’t keep up with what the game is trying to achieve – making you feel like you’re blasting hell for leather around the tarmac battlefield in a high-octane racer.

At times, the framerates drop to such inconsistent and choppy levels that you’ll think someone’s switched a strobe light on behind your eyes. During circuit races it’s just about bearable, but as soon as you start hitting the highway or as soon as there are other AI racers involved, all bets are off whether you’re going to successfully make it round the next corner as the game struggles to keep up, then overcompensates – slamming you straight into a wall as you try to predict what’s going to happen next.

The Mod Squad

As previously mentioned, the usual core elements that have become a signature trademark of the series are still in place and are probably still the main reason the series sells (at time of writing, it’s held a respectable Number 4 in the all-formats charts). Annoyingly though, you don’t get many modification options from the outset, meaning that you have to go through quite a few repetitive challenges and races before you finally unlock each of the Pro Shops and can start to tinker with your car’s setup.

One utterly astounding example of how the tech has not progressed is the fact that all your efforts in producing the ultimate street racer come to nothing when you take your car online for the first time. Most of the visual modifications are stripped (in order to keep the game running in multiplayer mode) so if you’ve spent hours carefully applying vinyls and cool paint jobs to show off online, you’ve wasted your efforts because all your opponents will see is your base car. It’s shocking to think that Black Box / EA think this is acceptable particularly when you see how other games seem to manage it effortlessly (remember the level of customisation you could achieve in Forza 2 and still get online with your super-modded car?)

Despite the technical failings of the game, it can still prove to be addictive. Though it’s incredibly repetitive at first, and most of the early races are ludicrously easy to blitz through, once you do actually get to buy more powerful grades of car and monkey around with their modification options (including the morphing body and wheel modes first touted in Need for Speed: Carbon) you might find you get hooked into the whole thing.

Annoyingly though, if you’re like me, you’ll find that those horrific frame drops will begin to jar and in later races and challenges they can prove to be game-breakingly bad to the point where you’ll end up getting nailed by the cops or damaging your car beyond repair in a race because you’re not only fighting with the wheel, you’re fighting against the game’s terrible performance.

Ultimately it’s a bit of a shame. All the key elements were in place to make sure EA’s recent run of superb top quality titles wasn’t tarnished, but Black Box Studios dropped the ball and some serious talks need to take place on the future of the series. Maybe EA need to ship the Criterion / Burnout crew over there to show Black Box how to code!

For what it’s worth, if you’re a dyed in the wool Need for Speed fan you might well be able to ignore the shoddy tech and find a little bit of addiction in the core gameplay elements. As a long-time fan of the series who’s stupidly bought every single game so far (yes, even ProStreet and Carbon) for the first time I’d have to tell you to keep your money in your pocket, or better still go and grab yourself a copy of Midnight Club: Los Angeles, which is a far more technically accomplished and superior game in virtually every way. It’s also about 20 quid cheaper too.

Our rating

3/10